Urbach says he snagged most of
them simply by impressing them with demos of his products.

Those products, which span the
entirety of virtual reality and 3D, have led Urbach to a string
of successes that include an Academy Award and, most
recently, a four-year production deal with HBO and Jon
Stewart.

So what is Urbach working with
Jon Stewart on?

A
camera capturing an NHL game for a VR stream.OTOY

Urbach is tight-lipped about the deal, only revealing that
they’ll be developing a new technology that will let Jon Stewart
produce short-form content for HBO Now, the company’s
over-the-top streaming service.

But when you look at the other
work OTOY is doing at the moment, it becomes pretty clear what
we’ll probably get: Jon Stewart in streaming virtual
reality.

OTOY is involved in many elements
on the software side of virtual reality. It does capturing,
creating, rendering, streaming — everything.

But putting together a cohesive
package that would allow a company like HBO to stream well seems
to be especially important. Earlier this year, OTOY worked with
the NHL on a virtual reality stream of a hockey game. And Urbach
said the company didn't just work on the software, but also
helped design the entire experience.

The future

Urbach sees streaming as a central part of the "everyday" virtual
reality experience of the future, and he sees it being completely
mobile.

When I ask him how virtual
reality will be able to encompass our increasing habit of
watching videos on our smartphones, he has one answer:
sunglasses.

“Nobody who is working on
anything attached to your eyeballs is thinking of it
differently," he says. "You will have a pair of sunglasses, and
you can switch it from glasses mode, to VR mode as you wish. The
VR will expand to fill your field of vision, or you can watch it
in a little window.”

This device of the future will not only bring virtual reality
into our everyday lives, according to Urbach, but also destroy
the primary way we use many other electronics.

“You’ll be done with any other screen,” he says. “You won’t need
it. It will be generated on a surface in the air. Put your finger
over your palm, it’s a phone. Your desk becomes a laptop.

"The resolution two generations
from now will give you a 4K experience, so you probably won’t go
to a movie theater. Why would you buy a wall-sized TV?”

Mobile, cinema, all of it is
going to merge into a sunglasses form factor, Urbach says.

“No single platform company
doesn’t see that,” he adds.

An entry from OTOY's VR
art contest.OTOY

The buzz

As a company, OTOY has always had
one foot in Hollywood-style digital effects and the other foot in
video games. And Urbach sees the future of virtual reality as
merging these two elements in ways we haven’t seen.

This might be one reason why
movie studios and TV giants have recently been banging down
Urbach’s door asking to partner with OTOY.

And at least one Hollywood
bigshot definitely sees OTOY as the future. Ari Emanuel, the CEO
of top agency WME — who had an Entourage character based on
him — talks to Urbach three times a day.

“I compare it to the introduction of color [to films],” Urbach
says. “Everyone wants color. And they don’t even know how to
shoot in color.” They want to be ahead of the game.

That’s where OTOY comes
in.

“Our role used to be, at best,
minimal or technical. Now every single one of [our partner
companies, like HBO] loves our VR strategy.” OTOY helped the NHL
set up the scene, and told them what types of experiences were
most compelling on virtual reality. Urbach says he sees part of
OTOY's role as jumpstarting these companies’ VR strategy, after
which the company will take more of a backseat. “But if they wait
two years [to learn VR], it’s too late,” he says.

Urbach thinks the virtual reality
space is primed to explode. “Two years ago we didn’t have all the
tools, the entire stack,” Urbach says. “HBO isone of our most recent
relationships, and it’s something that we really only would have
been able to put together in the last year or so.” Suffice to
say, it's going to be good.

Consumer headsets, like the
Samsung Gear VR and the forthcoming Oculus Rift, are beginning to
hit the market at the same time the technology for an “everyday”
virtual reality is coming together.

It may not be sunglasses yet, but
Urbach, Jon Stewart, and HBO are going to bring us something we
haven't seen.